August 29:
(1) (1809) American physician, poet, professor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. is born. He won Harvard Medical School’s Boylston Prize, for his paper on the benefits of using the stethoscope, which was not commonly used at the time.
(2) (1887) first Chief Minister of Gujarat Jivraj Narayan Mehta is born. Along with advocating the importance of research in medical education, he was also the personal doctor of Mahatma Gandhi.
(3) (1904) German physician Werner Forssmann is born. He shared the 1959 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the procedure that allowed cardiac catheterization, the ability to insert a catheter into a chamber in the heart.
